OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
To Adapt or to Annotate: Challenges and Interventions for Domain Adaptation in Open-Domain Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recent advances in open-domain question answering (ODQA) have demonstrated impressive accuracy on standard Wikipedia style benchmarks. However, it is less clear how robust these models are and how well they perform when applied to real-world applications in drastically different domains. While there has been some work investigating how well ODQA models perform when tested for out-of-domain (OOD) generalization, these studies have been conducted only under conservative shifts in data distribution and typically focus on a single component (ie. retrieval) rather than an end-to-end system. In response, we propose a more realistic and challenging domain shift evaluation setting and, through extensive experiments, study end-to-end model performance. We find that not only do models fail to generalize, but high retrieval scores often still yield poor answer prediction accuracy. We then categorize different types of shifts and propose techniques that, when presented with a new dataset, predict if intervention methods are likely to be successful. Finally, using insights from this analysis, we propose and evaluate several intervention methods which improve end-to-end answer F1 score by up to 24 points.
Contrastive Learning Reduces Hallucination in Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Pre-trained language models (LMs) store knowledge in their parameters and can generate informative responses when used in conversational systems. However, LMs suffer from the problem of "hallucination:" they may generate plausible-looking statements that are irrelevant or factually incorrect. To address this problem, we propose a contrastive learning scheme, named MixCL. A novel mixed contrastive objective is proposed to explicitly optimize the implicit knowledge elicitation process of LMs, and thus reduce their hallucination in conversations. We also examine negative sampling strategies of retrieved hard negatives and model-generated negatives. We conduct experiments on Wizard-of-Wikipedia, a public, open-domain knowledge-grounded dialogue benchmark, and assess the effectiveness of MixCL. MixCL effectively reduces the hallucination of LMs in conversations and achieves the highest performance among LM-based dialogue agents in terms of relevancy and factuality. We show that MixCL achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art KB-based approaches while enjoying notable advantages in terms of efficiency and scalability.
Evaluating Multimodal Interaction of Robots Assisting Older Adults
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We outline our work on evaluating robots that assist older adults by engaging with them through multiple modalities that include physical interaction. Our thesis is that to increase the effectiveness of assistive robots: 1) robots need to understand and effect multimodal actions, 2) robots should not only react to the human, they need to take the initiative and lead the task when it is necessary. We start by briefly introducing our proposed framework for multimodal interaction and then describe two different experiments with the actual robots. In the first experiment, a Baxter robot helps a human find and locate an object using the Multimodal Interaction Manager (MIM) framework. In the second experiment, a NAO robot is used in the same task, however, the roles of the robot and the human are reversed. We discuss the evaluation methods that were used in these experiments, including different metrics employed to characterize the performance of the robot in each case. We conclude by providing our perspective on the challenges and opportunities for the evaluation of assistive robots for older adults in realistic settings.
Independent component analysis in the light of Information Geometry
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

I recall my first encounter with Professor Shun-ichi Amari who, once upon a time in Las Vegas, gave me a precious hint about connecting Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to Information Geometry. The paper sketches, rather informally, some of the insights gained in following this lead.
First CE Matters: On the Importance of Long Term Properties on Memory Failure Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Dynamic random access memory failures are a threat to the reliability of data centres as they lead to data loss and system crashes. Timely predictions of memory failures allow for taking preventive measures such as server migration and memory replacement. Thereby, memory failure prediction prevents failures from externalizing, and it is a vital task to improve system reliability. In this paper, we revisited the problem of memory failure prediction. We analyzed the correctable errors (CEs) from hardware logs as indicators for a degraded memory state. As memories do not always work with full occupancy, access to faulty memory parts is time distributed. Following this intuition, we observed that important properties for memory failure prediction are distributed through long time intervals. In contrast, related studies, to fit practical constraints, frequently only analyze the CEs from the last fixed-size time interval while ignoring the predating information. Motivated by the observed discrepancy, we study the impact of including the overall (long-range) CE evolution and propose novel features that are calculated incrementally to preserve long-range properties. By coupling the extracted features with machine learning methods, we learn a predictive model to anticipate upcoming failures three hours in advance while improving the average relative precision and recall for 21% and 19% accordingly. We evaluated our methodology on real-world memory failures from the server fleet of a large cloud provider, justifying its validity and practicality.
Pareto Pairwise Ranking for Fairness Enhancement of Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Learning to rank is an effective recommendation approach since its introduction around 2010. Famous algorithms such as Bayesian Personalized Ranking and Collaborative Less is More Filtering have left deep impact in both academia and industry. However, most learning to rank approaches focus on improving technical accuracy metrics such as AUC, MRR and NDCG. Other evaluation metrics of recommender systems like fairness have been largely overlooked until in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new learning to rank algorithm named Pareto Pairwise Ranking. We are inspired by the idea of Bayesian Personalized Ranking and power law distribution. We show that our algorithm is competitive with other algorithms when evaluated on technical accuracy metrics. What is more important, in our experiment section we demonstrate that Pareto Pairwise Ranking is the most fair algorithm in comparison with 9 other contemporary algorithms.
The Risks of Ranking: Revisiting Graphical Perception to Model Individual Differences in Visualization Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Graphical perception studies typically measure visualization encoding effectiveness using the error of an "average observer", leading to canonical rankings of encodings for numerical attributes: e.g., position > area > angle > volume. Yet different people may vary in their ability to read different visualization types, leading to variance in this ranking across individuals not captured by population-level metrics using "average observer" models. One way we can bridge this gap is by recasting classic visual perception tasks as tools for assessing individual performance, in addition to overall visualization performance. In this paper we replicate and extend Cleveland and McGill's graphical comparison experiment using Bayesian multilevel regression, using these models to explore individual differences in visualization skill from multiple perspectives. The results from experiments and modeling indicate that some people show patterns of accuracy that credibly deviate from the canonical rankings of visualization effectiveness. We discuss implications of these findings, such as a need for new ways to communicate visualization effectiveness to designers, how patterns in individuals' responses may show systematic biases and strategies in visualization judgment, and how recasting classic visual perception tasks as tools for assessing individual performance may offer new ways to quantify aspects of visualization literacy. Experiment data, source code, and analysis scripts are available at the following repository: https://osf.io/8ub7t/?view\_only=9be4798797404a4397be3c6fc2a68cc0.
RangeAugment: Efficient Online Augmentation with Range Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

State-of-the-art automatic augmentation methods (e.g., AutoAugment and RandAugment) for visual recognition tasks diversify training data using a large set of augmentation operations. The range of magnitudes of many augmentation operations (e.g., brightness and contrast) is continuous. Therefore, to make search computationally tractable, these methods use fixed and manually-defined magnitude ranges for each operation, which may lead to sub-optimal policies. To answer the open question on the importance of magnitude ranges for each augmentation operation, we introduce RangeAugment that allows us to efficiently learn the range of magnitudes for individual as well as composite augmentation operations. RangeAugment uses an auxiliary loss based on image similarity as a measure to control the range of magnitudes of augmentation operations. As a result, RangeAugment has a single scalar parameter for search, image similarity, which we simply optimize via linear search. RangeAugment integrates seamlessly with any model and learns model- and task-specific augmentation policies. With extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset across different networks, we show that RangeAugment achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art automatic augmentation methods with 4-5 times fewer augmentation operations. Experimental results on semantic segmentation, object detection, foundation models, and knowledge distillation further shows RangeAugment's effectiveness.
PairReranker: Pairwise Reranking for Natural Language Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Pre-trained language models have been successful in natural language generation (NLG) tasks. While various decoding methods have been employed, they often produce suboptimal results. We first present an empirical analysis of three NLG tasks: summarization, machine translation, and constrained text generation. We found that selecting the best output from the results of multiple decoding methods can significantly improve performance. To further improve reranking for NLG tasks, we proposed a novel method, \textsc{PairReranker}, which uses a single encoder and a pairwise loss function to jointly encode a source input and a pair of candidates and compare them. Experiments on three NLG tasks demonstrated the effectiveness and flexibility of \textsc{PairReranker}, showing strong results, compared with previous baselines. In addition, our \textsc{PairReranker} can generalize to significantly improve GPT-3 (text-davinci-003) results (e.g., 24.55\% on CommonGen and 11.35\% on WMT18 zh-en), even though our rerankers are not trained with any GPT-3 candidates.
Video Segmentation Learning Using Cascade Residual Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Video segmentation consists of a frame-by-frame selection process of meaningful areas related to foreground moving objects. Some applications include traffic monitoring, human tracking, action recognition, efficient video surveillance, and anomaly detection. In these applications, it is not rare to face challenges such as abrupt changes in weather conditions, illumination issues, shadows, subtle dynamic background motions, and also camouflage effects. In this work, we address such shortcomings by proposing a novel deep learning video segmentation approach that incorporates residual information into the foreground detection learning process. The main goal is to provide a method capable of generating an accurate foreground detection given a grayscale video. Experiments conducted on the Change Detection 2014 and on the private dataset PetrobrasROUTES from Petrobras support the effectiveness of the proposed approach concerning some state-of-the-art video segmentation techniques, with overall F-measures of $\mathbf{0.9535}$ and $\mathbf{0.9636}$ in the Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets, respectively. Such a result places the proposed technique amongst the top 3 state-of-the-art video segmentation methods, besides comprising approximately seven times less parameters than its top one counterpart.
AgAsk: An Agent to Help Answer Farmer's Questions From Scientific Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Decisions in agriculture are increasingly data-driven; however, valuable agricultural knowledge is often locked away in free-text reports, manuals and journal articles. Specialised search systems are needed that can mine agricultural information to provide relevant answers to users' questions. This paper presents AgAsk -- an agent able to answer natural language agriculture questions by mining scientific documents. We carefully survey and analyse farmers' information needs. On the basis of these needs we release an information retrieval test collection comprising real questions, a large collection of scientific documents split in passages, and ground truth relevance assessments indicating which passages are relevant to each question. We implement and evaluate a number of information retrieval models to answer farmers questions, including two state-of-the-art neural ranking models. We show that neural rankers are highly effective at matching passages to questions in this context. Finally, we propose a deployment architecture for AgAsk that includes a client based on the Telegram messaging platform and retrieval model deployed on commodity hardware. The test collection we provide is intended to stimulate more research in methods to match natural language to answers in scientific documents. While the retrieval models were evaluated in the agriculture domain, they are generalisable and of interest to others working on similar problems. The test collection is available at: \url{https://github.com/ielab/agvaluate}.
GraphIX: Graph-based In silico XAI(explainable artificial intelligence) for drug repositioning from biopharmaceutical network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Drug repositioning holds great promise because it can reduce the time and cost of new drug development. While drug repositioning can omit various R&D processes, confirming pharmacological effects on biomolecules is essential for application to new diseases. Biomedical explainability in a drug repositioning model can support appropriate insights in subsequent in-depth studies. However, the validity of the XAI methodology is still under debate, and the effectiveness of XAI in drug repositioning prediction applications remains unclear. In this study, we propose GraphIX, an explainable drug repositioning framework using biological networks, and quantitatively evaluate its explainability. GraphIX first learns the network weights and node features using a graph neural network from known drug indication and knowledge graph that consists of three types of nodes (but not given node type information): disease, drug, and protein. Analysis of the post-learning features showed that node types that were not known to the model beforehand are distinguished through the learning process based on the graph structure. From the learned weights and features, GraphIX then predicts the disease-drug association and calculates the contribution values of the nodes located in the neighborhood of the predicted disease and drug. We hypothesized that the neighboring protein node to which the model gave a high contribution is important in understanding the actual pharmacological effects. Quantitative evaluation of the validity of protein nodes' contribution using a real-world database showed that the high contribution proteins shown by GraphIX are reasonable as a mechanism of drug action. GraphIX is a framework for evidence-based drug discovery that can present to users new disease-drug associations and identify the protein important for understanding its pharmacological effects from a large and complex knowledge base.
Resource Utilization Monitoring for Raw Data Query Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Scientific experiments, simulations, and modern applications generate large amounts of data. Data is stored in raw format to avoid the high loading time of traditional database management systems. Researchers have proposed many techniques to improve query execution time for raw data and reduce data loading time for traditional systems. The core of all the proposed techniques is efficient utilization of resources by processing only required data or reducing operations on data. The processed data caching in the main memory or disk can resolve this issue and avoid repeated processing of data. However, limitations of resources like main memory space, storage IO speeds, and additional storage space requirements on disk need to be considered to provide reliable and scalable solutions for cloud or in-house deployments. This paper presents improvements to the raw data query processing framework by integrating a resource monitoring module. The experiments were performed using a scientific dataset known Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Analysis of monitored resources revealed that sampling queries had the lowest resource utilization. The PostgresRAW can answer simple 0-JOIN queries faster than PostgreSQL. While one or more JOIN complex queries need to be answered using PostgreSQL to reduce workload execution time (WET). The results section discusses resource requirements of simple, complex, and sampling type queries. The result analysis of query types and resource utilization patterns assisted in proposing Query Complexity Aware (QCA) and Resource Utilization Aware (RUA) data partitioning techniques for raw engines and DBMS to reduce cost or data to result time.
Secure and Privacy Preserving Proxy Biometrics Identities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

With large-scale adaption to biometric based applications, security and privacy of biometrics is utmost important especially when operating in unsupervised online mode. This work proposes a novel approach for generating new artificial fingerprints also called proxy fingerprints that are natural looking, non-invertible, revocable and privacy preserving. These proxy biometrics can be generated from original ones only with the help of a user-specific key. Instead of using the original fingerprint, these proxy templates can be used anywhere with same convenience. The manuscripts walks through an interesting way in which proxy fingerprints of different types can be generated and how they can be combined with use-specific keys to provide revocability and cancelability in case of compromise. Using the proposed approach a proxy dataset is generated from samples belonging to Anguli fingerprint database. Matching experiments were performed on the new set which is 5 times larger than the original, and it was found that their performance is at par with 0 FAR and 0 FRR in the stolen key, safe key scenarios. Other parameters on revocability and diversity are also analyzed for protection performance.
5G Long-Term and Large-Scale Mobile Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

It is crucial for the service provider to comprehend and forecast mobile traffic in large-scale cellular networks in order to govern and manage mechanisms for base station placement, load balancing, and network planning. The purpose of this article is to extract and simulate traffic patterns from more than 14,000 cells that have been installed in different metropolitan areas. To do this, we create, implement, and assess a method in which cells are first categorized by their point of interest and then clustered based on the temporal distribution of cells in each region. The proposed model has been tested using real-world 5G mobile traffic datasets collected over 31 weeks in various cities. We found that our proposed model performed well in predicting mobile traffic patterns up to 2 weeks in advance. Our model outperformed the base model in most areas of interest and generally achieved up to 15\% less prediction error compared to the naïve approach. This indicates that our approach is effective in predicting mobile traffic patterns in large-scale cellular networks.
MoQuad: Motion-focused Quadruple Construction for Video Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Learning effective motion features is an essential pursuit of video representation learning. This paper presents a simple yet effective sample construction strategy to boost the learning of motion features in video contrastive learning. The proposed method, dubbed Motion-focused Quadruple Construction (MoQuad), augments the instance discrimination by meticulously disturbing the appearance and motion of both the positive and negative samples to create a quadruple for each video instance, such that the model is encouraged to exploit motion information. Unlike recent approaches that create extra auxiliary tasks for learning motion features or apply explicit temporal modelling, our method keeps the simple and clean contrastive learning paradigm (i.e.,SimCLR) without multi-task learning or extra modelling. In addition, we design two extra training strategies by analyzing initial MoQuad experiments. By simply applying MoQuad to SimCLR, extensive experiments show that we achieve superior performance on downstream tasks compared to the state of the arts. Notably, on the UCF-101 action recognition task, we achieve 93.7% accuracy after pre-training the model on Kinetics-400 for only 200 epochs, surpassing various previous methods
Critic-Guided Decoding for Controlled Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Steering language generation towards objectives or away from undesired content has been a long-standing goal in utilizing language models (LM). Recent work has demonstrated reinforcement learning and weighted decoding as effective approaches to achieve a higher level of language control and quality with pros and cons. In this work, we propose a novel critic decoding method for controlled language generation (CriticControl) that combines the strengths of reinforcement learning and weighted decoding. Specifically, we adopt the actor-critic framework to train an LM-steering critic from non-differentiable reward models. And similar to weighted decoding, our method freezes the language model and manipulates the output token distribution using called critic, improving training efficiency and stability. Evaluation of our method on three controlled generation tasks, namely topic control, sentiment control, and detoxification, shows that our approach generates more coherent and well-controlled texts than previous methods. In addition, CriticControl demonstrates superior generalization ability in zero-shot settings. Human evaluation studies also corroborate our findings.